Chef@Home: Chef Courtney Withey is back in the region — and loving it!

Homeward Bound

By Steve Barnes/Life@Home

Chef Withey cooking in her family Alplaus home.

Courtney Withey’s culinary precocity manifested itself by age 3, when she first cracked an egg with one hand. Let’s allow for a little proud-papa exaggeration from her father, Gary Withey, who likes to mention the feat. Even so, successful one-handed egg-cracking would be impressive for any child younger than, say, 5 or 6.

“She was always cooking with her mother,” Gary says. “It’s how she grew up.”
Almost a quarter of a century later, Courtney achieved another kitchen milestone. In April, at age 27, she was named executive chef of Schenectady’s Aperitivo Bistro. She is the first woman to run a kitchen for Mazzone Hospitality, the Scotia-based restaurant and catering company. Her culinary career has been fast-tracked since she decided, immediately after finishing a double major in liberal arts at Boston College, to enroll at Johnson & Wales University’s Denver campus for a culinary program designed to take two years. She finished in one. After a restaurant internship in Hawaii and kitchen stints in Maine and New Hampshire, Courtney returned to her native Capital Region three years ago to work for the Mazzone organization.

And she moved back into her childhood home. “My father said, ‘It’s just me now in this big house. Why don’t you stay with me for six months or a year to save money?’ I’ve been here ever since,” Courtney says.

Mussels with Blue Cheese, Tomatoes and Basil Oil

Home is a century-old four-bedroom in Alplaus, a Schenectady County hamlet that boasts the distinction of having the smallest population in a zip code in the continental United States. The house sits on an acre of land, and the Witheys own 15 acres across the street, alongside of which runs a creek, where the family kayak gets floated for the occasional paddle.

However, says dad with a laugh, “We pretty much stopped kayaking once we got the boat,” referring to a Larson runabout in the garage.

The acreage is also where Courtney maintains a vegetable and herb garden and tries to outfox hungry groundhogs. “I love it here. My dad is my best friend,” she says. “Why would I leave?”

Both work long hours on different schedules — Courtney at the restaurant, dad as an operations executive for Time Warner — and so Sunday suppers have become the occasion to eat together, often with friends and loved ones. Guests for today’s meal include dad’s girlfriend, Barb Tracey; Courtney’s boyfriend, Tom Giamichael; and a buddy of Tom’s who hails from the Cornhusker State and, naturally enough, is nicknamed Nebraska.

The spread of food for dinner includes Caesar salad, ribs with an Asian glaze, garlicky shrimp and tomatoes, hearty mac-n-cheese, mussels with blue cheese sauce, and chocolate mousse (the latter two are favorites of Tom’s).

“I’m going to really dig in. This has to get me through ’til Wednesday,” says Nebraska, who admits that his usual dining habits have resulted in him memorizing the Taco Bell menu. Later, after reaching for yet another rib and additional helpings of mac-n-cheese, Nebraska pats his stomach. Looking food-sleepy, he closes his eyes, leans back in his chair and says, “I think I’ll just rest here for a bit.”

Courtney smiles and says, “We like to feed Nebraska.”

Nebraska, a carousing pal of Tom’s, is a welcome presence at Sunday dinners despite his initial dubiousness about a Tom/Courtney relationship. The couple first met in the wee hours at a Lark Street bar during Albany’s Tulip Festival weekend in 2010, flirted and exchanged numbers. Opined Nebraska, “You’ll never see her again.”

She called Tom the next day. He helped her improve her skills on the guitar. They’ve been together ever since. Tom’s introduction to dad came when Tom was watching television at the Withey house and Gary came home, snuck up behind him and barked, “Hey!” Courtney had conveniently disappeared.

“I still think they set it up so he could scare me,” Tom says with a laugh. Courtney and dad share a look of merriment but confess to nothing.

Family and friends joining Courtney in her vegetable garden

Gary is thrilled by his daughter’s career success, doubly so that it’s at a restaurant located between office and home. But he did not immediately embrace her decision to pursue a chef’s career. Her older brother, Gary Jr., is a biomedical engineer with a Ph.D., and dad thought Courtney was on her way to becoming a teacher. (Her degrees were in English and human development.)

“I told her, ‘Restaurants are hard, hot work, the hours are long, it’s all nights and weekends,’” Gary says. “But she had a passion for it, and I knew she had the palate. … Even when she was young she could taste food and tell what was in it, what herbs and spices. She had a knack. That, and her willingness to work hard — she’s a very determined young lady — told me she’d be in good shape. And she is.”

After dinner, the group takes a stroll across the road and through a field to Courtney’s garden. On the edge of the field, on a hillock all its own, sits an enormous old oak tree with picture-perfect symmetry in the sweep of its foliage. It also has a large hole in the trunk that Tom and Nebraska speculate is home to groundhogs, hobbits or the Keebler elf. “It’s like a tree out of a fairy tale,” Tom says.

Courtney enters the garden through a gate in the anti-groundhog fence and picks her way down the rows of plants: tomato, pea, watermelon, cucumber, summer squash, zucchini, eggplant, herbs, lettuces, the bitter greens she loves; several carrot varieties. She clucks over slow-starting tomatoes and coos at a nascent pepper no bigger than a fingertip. Then she discovers a bottlecap-size radish. And another, longer and less bulbous, but still a baby. Impulsively, she picks them and brushes off the dirt. “Ohhhh! Look!” she says. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“She loves her garden so much,” Tom says. “She gets so excited every time she picks a vegetable. It’s like the first one she’s ever picked.”